out of context


kickers:

[scan from the Principia] Newton shamelessly plagiarizes Wittgenstein (marked yellow)

“I’m not saying that religion is a good thing. I’m saying that it’s a great thing. It can make you better or it can make you much worse. But it means that you take the question of how to live seriously.”
-Wilfred Cantwell Smith, (quoted in Putnam's farewell lecture)

Weyl à la Quine:
"In theoretical physics we have before us the great example of a [kind of] knowledge of completely different character than the common or phenomenal knowledge that expresses purely what is given in intuition. While in this case every judgment has its own sense that is completely realizable within intuition, this is by no means the case for the statements of theoretical physics. In that case it is rather the system as a whole that is in question if confronted with experience." -(Weyl, 1925, 140) -"Die heutige Erkenntnislage in der Mathematik", Symposion, 1: 1-23. Reprinted in: Weyl (1968, 511-42). English translation in: Mancosu (1998a, 123-42).

"I think mysticism might be characterized as the study of those propositions which are equivalent to their own negations. The Western point of view is that the class if all such propositions is empty. The Eastern point of view is that this class is empty if and only if it isn't."
-Raymond Smullyan

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
-Paul Erdos

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
-Niels Bohr

"photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times a second"
-from Godard's Le Petit Soldat

Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy.
Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics.
Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything.
-Leibniz

"If god exists then he's a shit and I want to kick him in the ass"
-from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander

"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
-Chesterton

"It is one of the reasons for the slow progress of philosophy that its fundamental questions are not, to most people, the most interesting, and therefore there is a tendency to hurry on before the foundations are secure."
-Russell, "On The Nature of Truth and Falsehood"

"Man does not seek happiness; only the Englishman does that."
-Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Phaedo: "I have nothing at all to do..."
-Plato, Phaedo

 

windy, winding, or just plain cool (single!) sentences:

"For example, when we discover some formal "incompleteness" result about some formalized theory/language and infer from that alone that there exists a corresponding incompleteness in our ability to "mean" something that the formalized theory has demonstrably not completely captured - as if it were somehow self-evident that our original meaning had been sufficiently captured by the formalism, been mirrored in it, if you like, to entitle us to read the "limitations" we discover in the formalism as indicative of corresponding conceptual "shortcomings" at the point of origin, namely in mathematical practice it was intended to model. "
-Benacerraf, "What Mathematical Truth Could not Be"

"Generalizing from the illustration, there are various possible understandings of (something's) being some given way (or of fitting some given concept) just where there is a way some object might be such that neither those who took that object in that condition to be the way in question, nor those who took it not to be that way, need be mistaken either as to fact or as to what being the way in question is."
-Travis, Unshadowed Thought

"So on no possible understanding—no possible way of conceiving—of that way which is the way one thinks things in thinking that thought could the way the lawn is fail to be its being as thus thought."
-Travis, Unshadowed Thought

"Words that spoke of something's being a desk bear a particular understanding of being a desk just in case for things to be as those words thus represented things is for that item to be a desk on that understanding of (its) being one"
-Travis, Unshadowed Thought

"Conceivably some future pigs will have to make do with their wings, their atrophied legs having become useless for walking"
-Travis, "The Face of Perception"

"That is to say, until the series of experiments was performed, the chief was prepared to discount completely the probability conferred by his dancing on the proposition that the young men had been brave in the face of a source of information as to the truth of this proposition of the kind we ordinarily rely upon in deciding the truth or falsity of statements about the past. "
-Dummett, "Bringing About the Past"

 

very droll, Humphrey:

"Actually sentences like 'Socrates is called Socrates' are very interesting and one can spend, strange as it may seem, hours talking about their analysis. I actually did, once, do that. I won't do that, however, on this occasion."
-Kripke, Naming and Necessity

"Extending this view, we see that each human being similarly participates in an inseparable way in society and in the planet as a whole. What may be suggested further is that such participation goes on to a greater collective mind, and perhaps ultimately to some yet more comprehensive mind in principle capable of going indefinitely beyond even the human species as a whole. "
-Bohm, "A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter"

"I have found that even solipsists are surprised by the fact that they have never met any other solipsist"
-Russell, My Philosophical Development

"Disgrace indeed, to be caught in a metaphysical position!"
-Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

 

continental salmagundi:

"So here we have three different worlds—three men, ordinary men who have different realities—and, of course, we could bring in a number of other beings: a blind man with a dog, a hunter with a dog, a dog with his man, a painter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl out of gas— In every case it would be a world completely different from the rest since the most objective words tree, road, flower, sky, barn, thumb, rain have, in each, totally different subjective connotations. Indeed, this subjective life is so strong that it makes an empty and broken shell of the so-called objective existence."
-Nabokov - Lecture on Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

"Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age, can I think of the world as there and I here judging it? I will never think any thoughts but these..."
-Yeats, A Vision